inportb

I spent a whole morning debugging a little piece of code. As usual, it turned out to be just a tiny overlooked concept. This time, it’s lazy evaluation.

Lazy evaluation is a common technique used to optimize program execution. Suppose we had the following boolean expression:

(continue reading…)

… or at least a revision of it anyway. But this means that I won’t have to touch that long epigenetics article for a while now.

This leaves me more time for Imagine. I’m going to be doing quite a bit to it in the near future, focusing on optimization. I know you’ve been asking for new features, but optimization has to come first — Java is slow… very slow. I’ll rewrite the compositors, implement clipping, and reimplement the filters. It won’t be as fast as Photoshop, but these optimizations will make way for further addition of features. Specifically, I’m looking to embed Rhino for user-generated plugins!

On the horizon, I see Imagine turning into a social tool, used not only to generate and share artwork, but also to distribute custom plugins, brushes, and such. Great things are afoot.

Though the different cell types in a multicellular organism share a common genotype, they can be markedly different in terms of phenotype. These variations in gene expression patterns are stable over mitotic cell divisions, but do not involve variations in the underlying genotype of the organism. The study of the mechanisms that maintain these differences among cell groups without changes to the DNA sequence itself is called epigenetics…

That’s yet another day spent writing my epigenetics article. Or pretending to, anyway. In-between trips to the Home Depot, replacing various things in the house, and fixing up my computer, I actually managed to get quite a bit written.

Meanwhile, Imagine has been getting very little attention. It’s my little Java 6 image manipulator project, launchable via Web Start.

Hello world, I’ve decided to have a go at blogging again.